Share this:

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak [official site] is a prequel to the legendary Homeworld space real-time strategy games, but this time – heresy! – set on land, as the Kushan race battle angry clans to reclaim ancient technologies found on the sandy planet they currently call home. While some of its developers (including studio boss and former Relic art lead Rob Cunningham) worked on the original games, this first began life as the unrelated ‘Hardware: Shipbreakers’, before morphing into the free to play multiplayer ‘Homeworld: Shipbreakers’ and then finally to the traditionally-sold, singleplayer and multiplayer package it is now. Deserts of Kharak has some bloody big boots to fill – can it possibly manage it?

Share this:

Imagine you live on a planet that’s entirely desert. Maybe it’s Tatooine. Maybe it’s Arrakis. Maybe Abydos or Korriban or Kharak. You wake up every morning. It’s a million degrees. You wasted all day yesterday in Toschi Station picking up power convertors, so your moisture vaporator is on the fritz. Imagine how damn thirsty you’d be.

Share this:

Oh, blimey. Suddenly there’s a new Homeworld game right around the corner. Confusingly it’s not set in space, but it’s definitely following the same visual design cues nonetheless. It’s also now a prequel to the events of the spaceship RTSes we know and love, and is developed by Blackbird Interactive, an outfit founded by various veterans of said original spaceship RTSes. I.e. space or not, sit up and pay attention to this.

Share this:

Homeworld is like that bestfriend who has drifted away over the years; these days you only chat by happenstance, and each time you’re left wondering why they never come around anymore.

This time, the upcoming Homeworld: Shipbreakers [official site] made a surprise showing at a conference for Unity developers in Boston last month. A video of the presentation only hit YouTube today, and given how difficult it is for anyone to keep things under wraps these days, that delay is nothing short of stunning.

Share this:

Something that was F2P becoming a straightforward commercial release certainly isn’t something you hear too often these days, but that’s what’s happening to Blackbird’s game now that Gearbox – who loaned Blackbird the Homeworld IP – got involved. A tweet from Mr Pitchford revealed: “With our investment, Homeworld Shipbreakers can be a proper commercial release. No need for F2P.”

So that’s interesting. I was kind of interested to see how they’d handle the free part, personally. But this is probably for the best.

Share this:

Yes, Gearbox have loaned Blackbird, a startup made from former-Homeworld devs and others, the right to call their fantastic-looking RTS Homeworld: Shipbreakers. Fashionable news shapes over at Polygon report that a deal was signed at PAX last week:

“We wanted the project to live and thrive and grow,” said Blackbird chief creative officer Aaron Kambeitz. “We didn’t want it to go to a publisher that would let it die. We reached out to them and congratulated them on [winning the IP] and that turned into a friendship.”